A Thousand and One Nights: A history of the text and its reception

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 162, 2012

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Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

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College of Arts, Mustansiriyah University, 2019

Alf Layla wa Layla or The Thousand and One Nights has been influential in the West since it was first translated into French in the 18th century by Antoine Galland. Various characters from these folk tales have themselves become cultural icons in Western culture, such as Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba. Despite the possible vogue of storytelling in medieval Islamic society, Arabic scholarship of the past has tended to look down upon The Thousand and One Nights as insipid and worthless, much below the standards of adab or literary discourse. Its coarse language and unrestrained compositions alienated them from the literati. However, the Thousand and One Nights has circulates across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, only to return again to its Eastern roots in contemporary Arabic Fiction. The text has made a circular return to the Arab world after centuries of translation into European languages, centuries that also correspond to the historical formation of modern empires. Crossfertilized with folklore, The Thousand and One Nights are ironically given the shape—albeit thoroughly reimagined—of the European novel. It was received in its Eastern home as the colonizers’ book. However, the tales and their narrator, Shahrzad, have been distorted by the colonizers and their translators. Shahrzad was treated as an Other, reduced from a learned and intelligent woman in the original stories to a silent, obedient and submissive one in order to make her suit the European taste of that period. This paper examines the retelling of the Nights as well as Shahrzad’s reappropriation and how her image was distorted, her qualities ignored and her physicality stereotyped and eroticized as the Orientalist Other. Keywords: Orientalism, Misrepresentation, Oriental other

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Endless Inspiration: One Thousand and One Nights in Comparative Perspective. ed. Orhan Elmaz. Piscataway, NJ, 2020

More than three hundred years after its ‘discovery’ by the West and its subsequent success in world literature, The Thousand and One Nights continues to constitute a potent drug for both general and learned audiences. Artists consume the multifarious tissue of the Nights as a powerful source of creativity and inspiration, while scholars contemplate the implications involved in reading and studying a collection of tales whose many mysteries are only gradually being unraveled. Discoveries often perceive the tip of the iceberg only, disregarding its hidden dimensions. As for the Nights, we need to add to this image a good deal of conscious mystification, pre-conceived bias, and self-referred expectations that blur our appreciation of the collection’s complexitiy and diversity. If, however, we diligently attempt to posit the Nights in an indigenous context, we discover a wealth of hidden riches that are still greater than those we have grown accustomed to when perceiving the Nights from the vantage point of our own intellectual universe. Some of the recent insights scholars have gained contribute decisively to widening the horizon of our appreciation of the Nights. The Nights owes its transnational success to a considerable extent to the performance of the young Syrian Maronite storyteller Ḥannā Diyāb whose tales Galland shaped to coincide with the expectations of his audience. More than three centuries before Galland’s French translation, the Nights had already been appreciated in princely manuscripts in Ottoman Turkey. In the pre-modern Muslim world, the Nights were but one of a variety of anonymous collections of tales, others of which include the North-African Arabic collection The Hundred and One Nights and an ultimately Persian collection that by way of its Ottoman Turkish translation inspired Pétis de la Croix’s French The Thousand and One Days. In inviting the audience to read the Nights ‘in and out,’ my contribution posits the Nights in the framework of Middle Eastern narrative culture. Rather than focusing on a single and, to some extent, arbitrary product of Middle Eastern (and Western) creativity, this perspective aims to do justice to both the collection’s complexity and its position in indigenous narrative tradition.

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Asian and African Studies, Volume 23, Number 1, 2014, 2014

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Marvels & Tales, 2004

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1001 Nights, 2020

The 1001 Nights can be considered a model for the globalizing Arab culture as to its genesis and the contacts with the Occident. The genesis of the 1001 Nights is a long process spread over several centuries of collecting, recording, continuously increasing, adapting to local circumstances and adjusting oral narratives. India was the cradle of what will be a pluricultural project on a large scale. The Indian tales Vrihat-katha (Great Narration) passed from mouth to mouth by narrators operating across markets, tea shops and other public places. So they reached Persia, where the Sassanid rulers insisted that the best narrators from all over the country should add luster to their courts. Under the reign of Khosrov II (590-628), Indian stories were translated from Sanskrit into Pahlavi.

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2018

Molded after Persian and Indian examples and transferred through a Persian collection called Hazar Afsaneh or Thousand Tales, Thousand and One Nights traveled along the Silk Road to reach the West through the French translator and orientalist Antoine Galland in the 18th century -1704-1717-. Its circulation in the Ottoman Empire in the early 17th century and its reproduction in Egypt had finalized the number of the nights to one thousand and one by the end of the 18th century. The fame of the narrative in the Arab-Ottoman world and its increasingly exotic allure made Arabian Nights a more popular alternative title instead of Thousand and One Nights. The Ottoman imperial court provided a bridge between the eastern Islamic world -India, Central Asia and the Middle East,- and western ones -Africa-. Mostly known as “orphan stories” and collected from unauthorized origins, Galland’s version of Nights was translated into different European languages to build “a rather shaky foundation” of the Nights together with the “eroticized and exoticized” French version of J. C. Mardrus -1899–1904-, Edward Lane’s “biblical” and censored British version -1838–40-, the pompous and animated version of Richard Burton -1885–88- and the first “modern translation” by Enno Littmann -1921–28- in Germany.

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